Darsha brings these acts of resistance in a form of a game she has known from her childhood, where you hide pebbles, leaves and pieces of glass in the ground and invite someone else to search for it, by leaving a tracking code. In the installation she uses metal construction modules, clay, wool, linen, fabrics cuts, organic finds such as petals, leaves, fibers, seeds and peels. These elements remind her of the swampy geography that her ancestors used to roam. The walls of institutions of oppression, such as borders and prisons, were built later on these muddy grounds, and could sink into oblivion anytime. Darsha secretly celebrates the beauty of nature taking back over a system that is slowly falling apart. She sees the manifests of violence and overcompensation of authority as a sign of weakness.

Similar to the children’s game, Darsha explored the premises of the 16th century chapel of HMK and found old bricks, eroded and battered, piled up in the institution’s storage space. These are leftovers from walls that once were, but which became too brittle to hold the chapel through time and had to be removed. As a fictional archeologist, Darsha excavates her own memories which are partly covered with fictional stories themselves. As an artist in exile it is only through memories, clear and faded, that she is able to imagine her home country. Together with the artist Jacob Dwyer, whom she invites as a guest to her residency, she explores the many layers of these memories which connect her to her motherland and translates them into different islands of sound that will be part of the installation. 

Alongside Choreography of detention; I hear the melody from the swamps, on view in the chapel space, Darsha presents her ongoing project The Postcards of Solidarity in the reception area of HMK. The Postcards seem like non-suspicious greeting cards from holiday destinations but are infused with codes of support and patterns that refer to traditional crafts still present in rural areas of Belarus. Darsha invites the visitors of the exhibition to send these postcards to the detained political prisoners. With this project, Darsha recognizes these patterns as the key to a lost identity, overshadowed by the suffocation of people, Belarusian language, historical archives and natural resources. She revives an obliterated part of her home country where innocent prisoners are held and continuously relocated as an act of disenfranchisement and depriving them from the messages of acknowledgement and support.

Darsha is the first artist in 2022 who presents her project after a six week residency on the 26th of February. She will engage in an informal talk with Jacob Dwyer about his auditive contribution to the exhibition during the opening at 15.00. Jacob Dwyer is an artist from the UK based in Amsterdam. His work often centers around personal encounters that could equally be seen as fables or heresy. He studied Experimental Film at Kingston university and completed a residency at De Ateliers (Amsterdam). His work has been shown in art spaces and film festivals including, IFFR (Rotterdam), IDFA (Amsterdam), Good Children (New Orleans), Vleeshal (Middelburg) and De Appel (Amsterdam). He has completed residencies at Deltaworkers (New Orleans) and Rupert (Lithuania).